I have finally put together what I think is a damm fine combination of Wordpress plugins to build the most Search Engine friendly online blog.
These are the problems that I have encountered and what plugin I have used to slove them.
Making the best content most Visable
First of all for a blog to be effective in the search engines it needs to be big, hench contain a lot of content. However this provides a problem that for the blog to contain a lot of content you need to sort this content so that the best content is the most readily availble. If your content is order just by the date it is entered, you are going to end up with people sorting through a load of content that is not relevant to you before they get to the good stuff. Now this isn’t so bad with a personal blog like this, categories do a good job, heir are only a few people in the world who would be interested in my worklog and work list, mainly collegus I know very well. However Some things like film reveiws and tech data may have a more wider audience. On other blog I have their is a large percentage of the content that makes abosulty no sense to be on the homepage.
I use two plugin to sort out these problems:
1.Adhesive now this is a plugin that makes a post sticky so that it remains at the two of the category that it is in.
2. Show on Front Page This plugin allows you to control if a plugin is shown on the front page. Meaning that posts that are very specific to a categorie and have no little general interest can be exculded fromt he front page.
Perventing Spammy Comments
Another probelm is perventing bots from posting on your blogs, A lot of Black hats SEO use blogs to post cpomment with lnks to their website on other people blogs. I use a combination of two plugin to fight this.
1. Trencaspammers this creates a image that has to be typed in to make sure that it is a uhman who is doing the posting.
2.
NoFollow, this plugin add the attribute, NO FOLLOW to any links that are adding into comments. Google realised that this is a huge issue and started to obay their attruibute, meaning that you don’t lose page rank because of spammy comments.
Encouraging the Search engine to index all the blog
For large blogs search engines won’t automatically index the whole site. What you need to do is convince the search engine that the sites is worth indexing. Their are a number of differtent factor that search engines will consider when indexing your site.
Firstly inbound links, search engines have long used inbound links to work out how important a website is. So the more inbound links the better, but if you want to get a large site index what you really want is inbound links that point deep into your site. Link into pervious years archive will convince the search engine that the content is still relevant and the searhc engine will then index all the of pages close to it.
Secondly, freshness of conent, if you want your site to stay index you will have to change the content regulary and kepe it upto date. This is not as easy as it looks also large blogs, it would be impossible to go in and update every post every day. What I recommend, is keep the part that need to be upto date, upto date.
Thridly, the URL that the pages have, this is a one where you can find a plugin to help you, personally I use:
1. Optimal title, this make sure that the title comes before the title of the bog.
2. MonthArchive, this amke sure that the monthly archive
Also try your best to get Mod_rewrite to make the URL better. This is vry important.
